Current digital cameras, such as the Kodak DC265 camera, capture images with a single-chip color CCD image sensor, process the images to provide “finished” RGB images, compress the images using JPEG compression, and store the images on a removable memory card. As depicted in FIG. 1, the DC265 allows the user to select different resolution settings, a high resolution setting that JPEG compresses all of the 1536×1024 pixels provided by the CCD sensor and a VGA setting that subsamples the CCD image to 640×480 pixels prior to JPEG compression. The DC265 also provides various quality settings (e.g. good, better, best) that use different JPEG quantizer tables to produce images with different files sizes, with the larger file sizes providing higher image quality. The DC265 also allows the user to create and select different folders into which images are stored. Once the card is filled with compressed image data, the images must be downloaded to a PC (assuming one is accessible) and deleted from the card, or the card must be replaced with another card (assuming the user has purchased and brought along another card). Otherwise, in order to be able to take more pictures, the user must delete some of the previously taken pictures, losing them forever.
The problem with this prior art camera is that the user must decide which quality setting to use prior to taking the picture. Once the memory card is full or nearly full, the only option is to delete pictures from the memory card. So, before taking pictures, the user must decide whether the images are “important” enough to be stored at a high quality, or whether it is more important to conserve memory card space, thus limiting the quality of the compressed images.